


Being the New Kid

by Zendeh



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: I don't know where this came from but, oh uh and vague mentions of firearms, super vague I'm trying not to get dragged into this mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-15 12:33:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16933329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zendeh/pseuds/Zendeh
Summary: Being the new kid in school comes with an expected set of challenges. An armed invasion was not one of them.





	Being the New Kid

**Author's Note:**

> Okay high key, this idea popped into my head and I wrote it in like an hour. I don't expect to go anywhere with this (at least, at the moment) so here you go! No editing! We are riding dangerous tonight!!

"My name is Artemis Crock. I live with my mother on the North side of Gotham."

Her voice was as low as it could go and still count as a breath. Her words come out shaky, betraying what her hands want to do: tremble.

They don't, though. Tremble. Her movements are sure and her pace is steady as she crawls through the air duct. She traverses forward, determined, and keeps her mind off of the surprisingly roomy shaft and the dust and debris gathering in her hair and the cries below. Instead, she goes on. Fact after fact.

"I like the color green. I like the way my shoulders ache when I draw back."

Thwack! Artemis tries not to flinch as another cry follows it below. She can't afford to get distracted. Her world was narrowed into a penlight beam that shines only on 3 things. Where's she's going. The pain in her hands and knees as she crawls forward. The words creeping out of her mouth.

"I'm 15. I'm a sophomore. I just transferred schools." Go to Gotham Academy, they said. Capitalize on your potential, they said. "Probably was a bad call." No one said anything about conveniently spacious air ducts. If it wasn't a selling point before, it was one now.

It didn't really matter what she said. The point was to not think about the other kids below or the chaos that engulfed them. She couldn't think about the figures dressed in black, like a textbook cliché. The guns they carried seemed out of a movie, but the warning shots they let off seemed anything but. She grit her teeth. Slits in the bottom of the vent reveal the students being gathered in groups below. She didn't know what the masked individuals wanted, but she didn't stick around long enough to find out.

Her mantra started over as the voices beneath her dimmed into the distance. She hadn't attended GA long enough to have memorized the general layout. But she knew that on the third floor, there were 10 classrooms until the northwest stairwell. The southeast one would have been closer to her starting point, but only the northwest ones led to the roof. So far, her plan was to make it to the end of the hallway, wait for the coast to be clear, and take the staircase to the roof. She'd have to figure out the rest from there. For now, she crept forward, chin tucked but gaze level.

Focused as she was, it shouldn't have been surprising when, 2 rooms before the staircase, the vent beneath her gave way and she tumbled out below. Landing in a heap of trash bags, Artemis didn't have time to be grateful as she was enveloped in a blinding light. Shocked after spending the past twenty minutes in the dark, she did the one thing she knew she wasn't supposed to and froze like a blonde deer in headlights.

"Oh! I guess someone else is dumb enough to go traversing in the ducts. And here I was thinking it was a dweeb thing," a sharp voice spat out.

"Well what do you propose we do about this. That is, if you're not too busy judging my life choices," someone else bit out. Their voice, strained at it was, was loaded with sass.

"Turn that thing off. She's no good to us blind," someone else reasoned.

The light being shone directly into her eyes cut out, and then reappeared dimmer somewhere else that was not directly in her face. She's beginning to lean more into her fight instincts and away from her flights ones when her eyes adjust and the room around her comes into focus. She had never been inside the janitor's closet and before today would have suspected that the three people with her could have said the same.

A small boy, with black hair obnoxiously slicked back and blue eyes sparkling with amusement. "Well, well, well. Look who decided to drop in," he says, and Artemis wrinkles her nose instinctively. He crouched next to a familiar red haired girl in a sweater with a light scowl who kicks at his side lightly for his transgression. She then tosses the flashlight in her hand to the other girl, a posh blonde who had perched on a nearby table, oblivious to the danger her skirt was in among the dust.

"Cool your jets. It's just the new girl," the blonde idly taunts, as if she has no horse in the race either way. At that point, Artemis' s molasses slow mind assigns names to the faces and she tenses again. What are they doing here?, she thinks.

She stays quiet as she tries to struggle subtly out of the pile she was in. It was just as well, seeing as the other three continued the conversation without her. The three exchanged a series of looks that Artemis could only decode a third of, none of it explaining why the playboy heir, the commissioner's daughter, and the classroom princess were here.

Artemis pulled her feet beneath her, ready to take to a fighter's stance when the boy - Richard Grayson? - let out a soft whoop and shot up from the ground. Barbara Gordon rolled her eyes, as exasperated as she seemed in class, threw up her hands and turned away, choosing to instead stand in front of a laptop propped up on an upside down trashcan. It appears, a decision was made.

"How," starts Bette Kane, easing to her feet with a fitting cat-like grace, "do you feel about taking down the patriarchy?" The right corner of her lip quirks up with a reference that presumably only she understands.

"What she means to say," Gordon says without looking away from the screen in front of her, "is since you're already here, you might as well help us put a stop to all of this nonsense."

Artemis blinked. I don't think this is what mom meant when she said to make friends.

**Author's Note:**

> So, big idea: Artemis has just recently transferred to Gotham Academy from Gotham North. She is expectantly hesitate and feels pretty out of place in this new (and pretty snooty) environment. She and Babs are the same year and thus she recognizes her from class. Dick is a stupid freshman who shows up in advanced calculus, making all of the upperclassmen feel bad. Bette Kane is the Queen Bee but don't ever say that to her face or mysterious and objectively bad but mostly mildly annoying things will happen to you for a week. It'll be just long enough to induce a foreboding sense everything your eyes land on Bette for a hair too long. 
> 
> I promise I'll probably edit this into a consistent tense when I'm not past my bedtime on a worknight. Probably.
> 
> Also, hi Paz ;-*


End file.
